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Multi-specialism

Sarah: "Being a multi-specialist has meant that I’ve had a huge range of opportunities that I just wouldn’t have had at any other firm. It means that I’ve done cases that have gone to the House of Lords on tax issues; I’ve done FSA investigations; I’ve done fraud, – high-court disputes. So it’s given me a huge range of experience and opportunities that I just wouldn’t have otherwise had."

Robert: "A good example of my work as a multi-specialist is that, in 2002 I think it was, we had a client who bought a company in the UK, so we helped them on that. Two years later they wanted to do a bond issue in the markets – we helped them on that. They then wanted to do some CO2 derivatives: again I was involved in that with a team of people. Then they wanted to buy an Australian company: we did the financing for that. And then, ultimately, with the downturn, came some restructuring and quite significant banking difficulties, and I spent six months restructuring their debt. So you can see that from 2002 to now, I’ve been helping that client on virtually everything it’s been doing that relates to English law. And that means I get to know them well… understand them and it actually, for me, it makes it far more interesting to know their business and see historically what they’ve done."

"Multi-specialism is the idea that lawyers here are trained to work in a very broad range of transactions and they’re not pigeonholed into narrow practice areas. So, for example, if you do a season in one of our financing teams, you might work on a bond issue, an insolvency and a securitisation during the course of six months, whereas a lot of other firms would tend to have specific groups that would deal only with those types of work. So, from the trainee’s perspective, I think it’s very advantageous because it means that you get to develop a much broader experience. It also makes things very interesting because you never quite know what you’ll be expected to do next, what the next transaction will be, or what the next piece of work you’ll be given is. While that can also be quite daunting because you can get to the stage where you’re close to the end of a seat in a particular department and you really feel like you’re getting a handle on things and then all of a sudden, you’ll be given some work on a topic that you might not even have known existed before. But, having said that, there’s quite a good support network and there’s always somebody you can ask, be it your supervisor or somebody else on the team. So, while it can be daunting, it’s achievable."

"I think we do have a unique multi-specialist approach in that all of our corporate groups are all general corporate groups – you don’t have a group that does mergers and a group that does takeovers… You’ll have a partner in each group who works with certain clients and whatever work comes in will get spread around the general corporate groups, so everybody has to know how to do a bit of everything. So you don’t have, highly specialised partners that only do one type of work, which I think is very beneficial when you’re training because it means you’re exposed to an awful lot of different types of deals, and types of work that you may not otherwise be exposed to if you were spending six months in purely a mergers group. It’s good for the client as well because it means that their lawyers are thinking laterally because they’re identifying issues that a specialised lawyer may not see or may not recognise. So I think it makes the partners here much more well-rounded in terms of expertise."

"I think as an advantage for trainees it’s very difficult to get bored because you can wake up one morning, check your emails and you’ve got something you would never expect to see – and something you’ve never dealt with before, you’ve probably never heard of before, which can be daunting but on the positive side it can be really engaging, really interesting, because you get to deal with things you’ve never thought of before."